I think his name is Brian something. He seems a lot more qualified than Melvill, he's a real test pilot and has flown prototype spacecraft before.
Why wass Melvill chosen to do the first flight out of the atmosphere over this guy?!?!?!?

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Mike Melvill took a radically new design of Mach-3 rocketplane and flew it 60 miles *straight up* without computer control, by the seat of his pants. If that doesn't make him a "real test pilot", I don't know what does

Mike Melvill took a radically new design of Mach-3 rocketplane and flew it 60 miles *straight up* without computer control, by the seat of his pants. If that doesn't make him a "real test pilot", I don't know what does

Designer Burt Rutan and test pilots Brian Binnie, Mike Melvill and Peter Siebold were honored by their peers Saturday night for their work on the pioneering space program, the first privately funded, manned space program to successfully reach and return from suborbital space.

Mike Melvill, a self-proclaimed high school drop out , actually got hooked up with Rutan when he and his wife decided to buy one of Rutan's kit planes... That was years ago and Rutan ended up hiring both of them to the company. Melvill has tons of flying experience. That's why he was the pilot of the June 21st mission that broke 100 km.... Pete Siebold was actually supposed to be the pilot for the Wednesday launch from what I've heard, but something about health problems prevented him from going up. So Brian Binnie had his turn yesterday...

I'm sure that Binnie's previous hard landing of SS1 (which trashed the gear and set Scaled back a couple of months) also had something to do with his position in the back of the rotation.

Well ... unless Rutan's a particularly nasty guy ... I doubt it. It's better to have something happen, learn from it, improve something (even if it's just improved training) and then just get on with it.

It's likely that Rutan know's the difference between incompetence and bad luck. The reason that Binnie was at the end of the draw was probably because he drew last.

There were three test pilots at Scaled on Tier One, and they were each supposed to fly one flight each. Melvill probably got the first one primarily because of his life's commitment to Scaled, and the fact that he had the most flight hours in SpaceShipOne at that point. To be honest, I doubt that competance was in issue - they can all fly perfectly well.

He got nod the second time because Siebold couldn't do it, and Rutan decided it was better for Melvill - who had already done such a mission - to try the repeat, since he only had literally a days notice.